The invention generally relates computer systems and computer executed methods, and more specifically to scaling video delivery.
In general, video is widely acknowledged as an Internet Protocol (IP) network bandwidth consumer. Even for a relatively low bandwidth standard definition, 750 kilobits per second is not an unusual data rate. High definition video is typically 1500 kilobits per second or more.
In general, with unicast network video transmission, each viewer requires his or her own video stream. In particular, live video poses an outsized challenge because a company may have tens of thousands of users watching the live video, with hundreds of users watching from the same building. Even with caching at the building level and one gigabit (Gb) Ethernet wiring, one hundred users can effectively tie up more than half of the usable IP bandwidth. More layers of caches can be added, but with that comes more complexity and cost.
Multicast network transmission is one typical solution to this problem. In a multicast transmission, the same stream is shared by multiple users who happen to be using the same network device. The traditional way of doing IP multicast for video is to send Moving Picture Experts Group Transport Stream (MPEG TS) packets (c.f. ISO/IEC standard 13818-1 or ITU-T Rec. H.222.0) via User Datagram Protocol (UDP) multicast. However, there are several drawbacks to this approach.